A crowd was streaming towards the Rue Nicaise (where Cardillac lived), trooping together at the door, shouting, raging, surging, striving to storm into the house, kept back with difficulty by the Marechaussée, who were guarding the place. Amid the wild distracted uproar, voices were heard crying, "Tear him in pieces! Drag him limb from limb, the accursed murderer!" At length Desgrais came up with a number of his men, and formed a lane through the thickest of the crowd. The door flew open, and a man, loaded with irons, was brought out, and marched off amid the most frightful imprecations of the raging populace. At the moment when Mademoiselle Scuderi, half dead with terror and gloomy foreboding, caught sight of him, a piercing shriek of lamentation struck upon her ears. "Go forward!" she cried to the coachman, and he, with a clever, rapid turn of his horses, scattered the thick masses of the crowd aside, and pulled up close to René Cardillac's door. Desgrais was there, and at his feet a young girl, beautiful as the day, half-dressed, with dishevelled hair, and wild grief, inconsolable despair in her face, holding his knees embraced, and crying in tones of the bitterest and profoundest anguish, "He is innocent! he is innocent!" Desgrais and his men tried in vain to shake her off, and raise her from the ground, till at length a rough, powerful fellow, gripping her arms with his strong hands, dragged her away from Desgrais by sheer force. Stumbling awkwardly, he let the girl go, and she went rolling down the stone steps, and lay like one dead on the pavement. Mademoiselle Scuderi could contain herself no longer. "In Christ's name!" she cried, "what has happened? What is going forward here?" She hastily opened the carriage-door and stepped out. The crowd made way for her deferentially; and when she saw that one or two compassionate women had lifted up the girl, laid her on the steps, and were rubbing her brow with strong waters, she went up to Desgrais, and with eagerness repeated her question. "A terrible thing has happened," said Desgrais. "René Cardillac was found, this morning, killed by a dagger-thrust. His journeyman, Olivier, is the murderer, and has just been taken to prison."